[11.xii.23.a : lundi] With the gaps in V.W.’s diary and the conditions of my personal work suggesting certain modifications, augmentations to … the flow of text I call “Skinny Dipping” : as always, it’s a chain of coincidental discoveries, I follow the bread crumbs (manna) until I arrive. / For “my” Project (but this isn’t the best term anymore, Work : ? ,, the capital indicative that what I mean is the Unfolding Text, so why not call it that?) for “my” Unfolding Text, I’ve been collecting a set of concept words & phrases which will act as nodes in an interconnected web. This morning I thought I should add piano to the concept-map and since (i) I have been reading Fruits of the Earth by André Gide, and/or (ii) I chanced across a photograph of André Gide playing a piano :: mentally I drew a line between piano and André Gide in my notebook, but this posed a question: what was Gide’s relationship to/with the piano? A quick internet search provided a few answers and pointed me to The Journals of André Gide which I (of course) already have in my personal library.

The title for today’s skinny dip is from the 29 June 1913 entry in Gide’s Journal. Gide starts off with what he is reading “aloud, for hour” and then reports : “I spend from three to five hours (and more often five than three) in piano-practice (exclusively Bach and Chopin).” Then Gide adds up his reading time, his piano-practices, his correspondence “which every day takes one or two hours” so that there is “hardly any time left for personal work”. In my online search I found a quote from the 24 juin 1913 Journal entry in which Gide confesses that he’s getting very little writing done because he constantly quits his pen for his piano. This line is missing from Justin O’Brien’s “selection” which disappoints me because I want to read everything that Gide has to say about the piano, so I’ll probably have to procure a full set of Gide’s Journal [in the original {i}] : add that to my potential acts of translation.

new directions

With the gaps in V.W.’s Diary :: I see an opportunity to make more use of this space of writing which keeps contact with V.W. and her life in real time, to add new or fold-in already existing writing spaces to this one. One of the early titles I used for this writing project was The Blue Nile, the evocative image Larry McMurtry used to describe V.W.’s Diary : the Blue Nile of literature. And there isn’t just a single Nile of literature. Another is the White Nile, being Marcel Proust’s BIG NOVEL / roman à fleuve. Last year I encountered a few (random) references to the Green Nile, but without any specific connection to a writer. What is the Green Nile of literature? I asked. Well, obviously, the Green Nile of literature is James Joyce—all of his work or just Finnegans Wake? :: riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. Let’s say at least Finnegans Wake. / In Skinny Dipping I had the intention of bringing together the three great colored Niles of literature, but I immediately knew that I should not write a book (blog) about three of the most written-about writers of the twentieth century. What could I say about Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, or James Joyce that anyone would care to hear? The solution to my expressed intention was to devise a mapping of Blue, White, and Green on to another set of writers. The mapping I devised looks like this:

Blue → Ann Quin

White → Jacques Roubaud

Green → Miklós Szentkuthy

Each of those writers is a term in my concept-map for “my” Unfolding Text. Ann Quin was inspired by her reading of The Waves by Virginia Woolf to see the potential of experimental writing to express what … While I am interested in the body of work of all these writers I would say Passages by Ann Quin would be the Blue entry point. For White, I have picked the great fire of london by Jacques Roubaud (like Proust’s novel, it’s an exploration of memory), and for Green, Prae by Miklós Szentkuthy (whose connection to Joyce is that he translated Ulysses into Hungarian).

But there are other (writing) spaces (that I seek out from/by instinct) : for several months I kept a Diary of the Eternal Novel (as a way  of reading Mario Levrero’s The Luminous Novel more deeply) and often I wondered if that diary could find a home here inside Skinny Dipping. And if I’m reading in real time the diary of Virginia Woolf, why not read the diaries of other writes too? if only to fill in some of the gaps: André Gide, Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Emilo Renzi, Henry Thoreau, The Goncourt Brothers, etc.

time management

…hardly any time left for… For the past three days I’ve been … not just the past three days, the process began on the 22nd of October with a long handwritten description of my process to produce “my” Golden Notebook. What this Golden Notebook is remains to be determined, and maybe I’ll leave it in some kind of suspended state : it could be the text that I type, the sum total of my typescripts, or maybe it is what I chose to place in the Museum of Transformation (“my” publication project consisting of Skinny Dipping, the serial novel (experiment), Orpheus (theory), and Twisty Passages / Zine (what I put on @theangler.writing.exchange)). For the past three days, I’ve been trying to work to my plan, the implementation of a method of production that will lead to (i) reading the books that I’ve collected as part of several interconnected reading projects, (ii) writing a series of short novels or novelettes or collections of poems, and (iii) writing a set of critiques of … how (ii) & (iii) differ (if at all) remains to be seen. / But like André Gide, I have to contend with my distractions, in my case the principle distraction is the time spent doing paid work. Housekeeping claims at least 90 minutes of each day (probably two hours isn’t exaggerating). Exercise, another hour. Piano, one hour (but maybe time spent playing the piano will increase as I delve more deeply into Gide’s Journal — where will that time come from? to do: invent time machine). Reading & writing get the lion’s share at about six hours per day. (And that is still not nearly enough!)

a note

{i} [26.xii.23.a : mardi] As much as I would love to add translating the journals of André Gide to my list of projects, Justin O’Brien has translated a more complete (I’m not sure if it is exhaustive) edition of Gide’s Journal published in four volumes by Alfred A. Knopf in 1948.

#piano #AndreGide #AnnQuin #JaquesRoubaud #MiklosSzentkuthy #TimeManagement